Development of a portable setup suitable for in vivo measurement of the dielectric properties of biological tissues

In the present paper, a preliminary study for the development of a portable setup suitable for in vivo measurements of tissue dielectric properties is presented. The setup consists of a hand-held spectrum analyzer, equipped with a tracking generator to operate as a vector network analyzer, and an in-house software for the post-processing of measured parameters. The proposed setup was optimized to operate in a broad frequency band (from 500 MHz to 3 GHz), minimizing the measurement uncertainty. The reliability of the setup was assessed through a comparative study with a commercial system, measuring the dielectric properties of reference liquids and ex vivo biological tissue samples.